The social mind: disentangling affective and cognitive routes to understanding others

ABSTRACT

To flexibly adjust behaviour to that of other people around us requires some representation of their overt actions, but also of the driving forces behind them, that is, their goals, intentions, and emotions. Socio-affective and -cognitive functions enable such representations via creating vicarious affective states in the observer (empathy) or by accumulating abstract, propositional knowledge of another person’s mental state (Theory of Mind). While the empathic sharing of another’s emotions is implemented by those neural networks that also process first-hand emotion, Theory of Mind activates a widespread network that seems to process information independent of its specific modality or content. Crucially, these two routes can function independently as individual differences in the respective capacities and network activations are unrelated and selective impairments in one or the other function occur in psychopathology. However, they may co-activate and co-operate in complex social situations, determining how prosocially interactive behaviour unfolds.

KEYWORDS:

• Empathy
• compassion
• theory of mind
• mentalizing
• social cognition

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Tania Singer, Anne Böckler-Raettig, Fynn-Mathis Trautwein, Katrin Preckel, and Matthias Schurz for the insightful discussions on social affective and cognitive processes that have greatly stimulated the writing of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Philipp Kanske is a neuroscientist and psychotherapist whose research focuses on emotion–cognition interactions such as emotional attention, emotion regulation, empathy and mentalizing. Using neuroimaging methods, he also studies these functions in psychopathology to further our understanding of impairments and find starting points for intervention. He is a graduate of the University of Oregon (MSc), Technische Universität Dresden (Dipl.-Psych.), University of Leipzig (PhD) and Heidelberg University (Habilitation).